When duty trumped politics

One of the benefits of writing history is the realization that the past was usually just as screwed up as the present. I have written several books about the post-World War II period, which we mythologize as a kind of golden age of American power, when partisan disputes ended “at the water’s edge” and people actually respected the White House and Congress. In fact, politics could be even nastier in the good old days.

If you think the tea party is tough to deal with, imagine how President Dwight D. Eisenhower felt about the red-baiting demagogue Sen. Joe McCarthy, who blithely accused heroes like Gen. George Marshall of treason. In 1952, when McCarthy threatened to start a whispering campaign that Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson was a homosexual (he was not), Democrats around President Harry S. Truman threatened to hit back with rumors about the alleged wartime time love affair between Eisenhower and his driver, Kay Summersby. Mutual Assured Destruction was a term later applied to nuclear deterrence, but it had long been the informal code of politics: In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson gathered dirt on Republican nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater lest Goldwater use his own stockpile of dirt on LBJ.

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Still, the politics of the 1950s and ’60s were better than those of our current era in several important ways. There was much more of a sense that American society, the government but also the people, had an obligation — a duty — to come together to face national problems. There was also a greater faith that they could solve these problems. Eisenhower routinely used the word “sacrifice” to describe what people had to offer to face down the threat of international communism. Maybe that threat was, in retrospect, exaggerated, but in his day the wealthy were far more willing to pay higher taxes (up to 90 percent marginal rates) to meet the burdens of national greatness. When Eisenhower and Congress invested in infrastructure — building the Interstate Highway System — it was paid for by a gas tax. Imagine a politician today calling for “sacrifice,” very high marginal rates on the rich, or a gas tax. And Ike was a Republican!